I’ve just seen a TV programme about three single mothers being homeless and the utterly filthy way they are treated by their local councils. (BBC one March 3rd 2015 – ‘No Place to Call Home) see it here:

One woman & her two kids had been forced to leave the privately rented flat she was renting because the boiler broke and the typically nauseating private landlord simply refused to mend it. So this single mother arranged to live with her own mother in the mother’s council house.

But the council found out and told the mother she would be evicted from her own council house herself if she continued to allow her daughter & two kids to stay with her as the council said that made the council house overcrowded.

As the threat from the council now meant the mother, daughter and two kids would all be thrown out on the streets to be homeless by this spiteful and vindictive council, the mother had no choice but to tell her own daughter to leave.

This made the daughter and two kids ‘street homeless’- they had absolutely nowhere to go except live on the streets because they could not find private accommodation they would be able to afford quickly enough, if at all, as rents were nearly all far higher than they had any hope of being to afford – even if they received ‘Housing Benefit’.

Housing benefit has been cunningly arranged by this disgusting Tory Government to be too low for tenants receiving it to have much hope of finding any privately rentable accommodation.

So, this single mother is obliged to inform the council she and her young children will be on the streets, and could the council therefore re-house her as the law says it has a legal obligation to do.

No, said the council. We know we have a statutory duty where an Act of Parliament says councils have a legal obligation to house homeless parents with children, but we’re not going to. And we’re not going to because part of that same Act of Parliament says that if a person has made themselves ‘intentionally homeless’ we are allowed to refuse people we would otherwise have a legal obligation to re-house.

So we are telling you, single mother with two young kids, that we think you are intentionally homeless and you can go F**k yourself; we’re not going to house you.

The Council used the Alice in Wonderland logic that this single mother was “intentionally homeless’ because she had ‘voluntarily’ left ‘her previous accommodation’ the privately rented accommodation with it’s broken boiler the private landlord refused to mend with winter approaching.

The council seemed to have a convenient memory lapse in forgetting it was the council itself which had forced her own mother to evict her daughter, throw her out onto the streets with her kids by threatening to make all of them homeless by taking the council house away from the woman’s own mother. This is a brutally corrupt piece of pure Kafkaesque wickedness on behalf of the council.

Another single mum with three kids had been evicted by her private landlord as revenge because she had asked him to do essential repairs like stop the excessive dampness which was making all the walls and ceilings covered in black mould – which is dangerous to health as it produces lung disease. She was intentionally homeless too, said the council.

I know of another single parent evicted from their house by the fraudulent USA bank Lehmans, who went bankrupt after causing the recent World wide recession by their criminally dishonest, immoral, grasping and evil banking activities.

The council told that parent too they were ‘intentionally homeless’ on the grounds they shouldn’t have bought their house several years previously by using a mortgage as ‘they ought to have known they would be unlikely ever to work again because they were a single parent’.

I know the councils up and down the country are actually breaking the law ( I’ve checked the legislation) by using this ‘intentional homeless’ nonsense in the way they are, but more of that later.

Then I saw today’s (8th March 2015 BBC) news rabbiting on about the sixty thousand homeless people in New York right now, enduring the coldest winter weather, lots of ice & snow, for decades. New York is always very cold in winter anyway, so this must be awful if you’re living on the streets.

Then the news item featured a single mum in her early thirties working in the financial industry who still didn’t earn enough to afford the stratospheric rents of New York, so she was sharing hostel accommodation with other homeless families.

This housing crisis is almost entirely caused by the banks ramping up the price of housing so they can lend ever larger sums of money. Housing in the UK is now about eleven times an average salary instead of the three times it was in about 1970 – before the greedy banks got into the business of mortgage lending by destroying most of the building societies.

That would cost £91 200 to build, plus the extra cost of buying the land on which it stands. Agricultural land averages about £10 000 at the moment and with at least 16 tiny little rabbit hutches to the acre the land should cost a miniscule £62 or so, and it did a couple of generations or so ago.

But of course today, the bureaucracy and corruptions of the entire housing market and in particular that Orwellian gem of corruption ‘planning permission’ has made a nonsense of land value to build housing on and consequently it can cost millions per acre.

Apparently the average cost land with building permission per acre is now about £800 000 which makes one building plot to build a tiny rabbit hutch of a house on with the average of 76 sq metres for this type of house, is now about £50 000.

So after adding that extortionate £50 000 cost of the building plot to the build cost of £91 200 we get the total cost of a new house for £141 200. Actually the average price is about twice that at present. That will be the £141 000 profit for the house builder then !

But, whatever the price new, shouldn’t the cost of a second hand house decrease at least a bit over time just like other second hand, used goods ?

Errrrrr, yes, I should think it ought to and certainly did before property started to become a good wheeze for Spivs & speculators from about 1950 onwards.

So, take my ordinary four bedroomed London terrace house of 200 square metres which would cost about £240 000 to build new today, plus the average cost of £50 000 for the plot of land, that would be £290 000 built new today. But actually the current value is about £1.4 million.

Anyway, back to the real cost of building it at £290 000. If the house lost just one half per cent a year in value ( about £1500 in the first year) the 135 year old house would have lost 67% of its original cost and would be about £194 300 to buy today. Or that rabbit hutch house costing £141 200 today would cost about £94 604 when 135 years old; (except it will never get to be 135 years old because that type of house is generally built so badly & shoddily it is unlikely to have life of barely more than 20 years).

So this example means over a theoretical life of a house off 200 years each inhabitant pays a modest half percent cost of the total building cost which is £1 500 a year towards the building cost of the London house costing £290 000 to build in 2015. But instead, if you rent that same house today in London you will be paying the 6% of the 2015 ‘value’ the house has of £1 400 000 that landlords expect to rent homes out to tenants for and this will be a cool £84000 a year rent you will paying instead of £1500 previously mentioned.

That’s what it used to be like for centuries until the modern era, when the banks made houses repositories of value, rather than real homes to live in.

Bastards !

So, what with the builders building revoltingly cheap and nasty miniature homes too small even to contain normal necessary possessions and making extortionate profits of up to 100% and even higher, and the banks making billions of pounds out of expensive, often rip-off loans to people to buy homes, the entire country is in the icily corrupt grip of a bunch of thieving sharks really. And at the bottom are the people being forced to live on the streets or in repulsively inhumane council ‘emergency accommodation’.

The methods of money production in society today are profoundly corrupting in ways that would matter to everyone if they were clearly understood. The essence of this debate is: who should be allowed to create money, how and at whose risk?………

……One of the most memorable quotes about money and banking is usually attributed to Henry Ford:

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”………..

How is it done? The process is so simple that the mind is repelled. It is this:

“Whenever a bank makes a loan, it simultaneously creates a matching deposit in the borrower’s bank account, thereby creating new money.”

I have been told many times that this is ridiculous, even by one employee who had previously worked for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation of the United States. The explanation is taken from the Bank of England article, “Money creation in the modern economy”, and it seems to me it is rather hard to dismiss……..

It is a criminal offence to counterfeit bank notes or coins, but a banking licence is formal permission from the Government to create equivalent money at interest…….

There is a wide range of perspectives on whether that is legitimate. The Spanish economist, Jesús Huerta de Soto explains in his book “Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles” that it is positively a fraud—a fraud that causes the business cycle. Positive Money, a British campaign group, is campaigning for the complete nationalisation of money production……..

We are in a debt crisis of historic proportions because for far too long profit-maximising banks have been lending money into existence as debt with too few effective restraints on their conduct and all the risks of doing so forced on the taxpayer by the power of the state. A blend of legal privilege, private interest and political necessity has created, over the centuries, a system that today lawfully promotes the excesses for which capitalism is so frequently condemned. It is undermining faith in the market economy on which we rely not merely for our prosperity, but for our lives………….

Even before quantitative easing began, we lived in an era of chronic monetary inflation, unprecedented in the industrial age. Between 1991 and 2009, the money supply increased fourfold. It tripled between 1997 and 2010, from £700 billion to £2.2 trillion, and that accelerated into the crisis. It is simply not possible to increase the money supply at such a rate without profound consequences, and they are the consequences that are with us today, but it goes back further. The House of Commons Library and the Office for National Statistics produced a paper tracing consumer price inflation back to 1750. It shows that there was a flat line until about the 20th century, when there was some inflation over the wars, but from 1971 onwards, the value of money collapsed. What had happened?…….

where did all the money that was created as debt go? The sectoral lending figures show that while some of it went into commercial property, and some into personal loans, credit cards and so on, the rise of lending into real productive businesses excluding the financial sector was relatively moderate. Overwhelmingly, the new debt went into mortgages and the financial sector…….

Money is used to buy houses, and we

20 Nov 2014 : Column 438

should not be at all surprised that an increased supply of money into house-buying will boost the price of those homes…………

My point is that if a great fountain of new money gushes up into the financial sector, we should not be surprised to find that the banking system is far wealthier than anyone else. We should not be surprised if financing and housing in London and the south-east are far wealthier than anywhere else. Indeed, I remember that when quantitative easing began, house prices started rising in Chiswick and Islington. Money is not neutral. It redistributes real income from later to earlier owners—that is, from the poor to the rich, on the whole…………

Once the Bank legitimises the idea of money creation and giving it to people in order to get the economy going, the question then arises: if you are going to create it and give it away, why not give it to other people? That then goes to the question: what is money? I think it is the basis of a moral existence, because in our lives we should be exchanging value for value. One problem with the current system is that we are not doing that; something is being created in vast quantities out of nothing and given away. The Bank explains that 40% of the assets that have been inflated are held by 5% of households, with 80% held by people over 45. It seems clear that QE—a policy of the state to intervene deeply in money—is a deliberate policy of increasing the wealth of people who are older and wealthier.

Douglas Carswell (Clacton) (UKIP): I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing this important subject to the attention of the House. Does he agree that, far from shoring up free market capitalism, the candy floss credit system the state is presiding over replaces it with a system of crony corporatism that gives capitalism a bad name and undermines its very foundations?

Steve Baker: I am delighted to agree with my hon. Friend—he is that, despite the fact I will not be seeing Nigel later. We have ended up pretending that the banking system and the financial system is a free market when the truth is that it is the most hideous corporatist mess. What I want is a free market banking system, and I will come on to discuss that.

11.45 am

Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab):

It is unfortunate that it is so little understood by the public that money is created by the banks every time they make a loan. In effect, the banks have a virtual monopoly—about 97%—over domestic credit creation, so they determine how money is allocated across the economy. That has led to the vast majority of money being channelled into property markets and the financial sector. According to Bank of England figures for the decade to 2007, 31% of additional money created by bank lending went to mortgage lending, 20% to commercial property, and 32% to the financial sector, including to mergers and acquisitions and trading and financial markets. Those are extraordinary figures…

……the overwhelming majority of the money created inflates property prices, pushing up the cost of living.

In a nutshell, the banks have too much power and they have greatly abused it. First, they have been granted enormous privileges since they can create wealth simply by writing an accounting entry on a register. They decide who uses that wealth and for what purpose and they have used their power of credit creation hugely to favour property and consumption lending over business investment because the returns are higher and more secure. Thus the banks maximise their own interests but not the national interest.

Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab): Given what my right hon. Friend has just said, is there not an argument, in this situation of unlimited credit from banks, for the Bank of England to intervene?

Mr Meacher: My hon. Friend anticipates the main line of my argument, so if he is patient I think I will be able to satisfy him. Crucially, only 8% of the money referred to went to businesses outside the financial sector, with a further 8% funding credit cards and personal loans….

…..The question at the heart of the debate is who should create the money? Would Parliament ever have voted to delegate power to create money to those same banks that caused the horrendous financial crisis that the world is still suffering? I think the answer is unambiguously no. The question that needs to be put is how we should achieve the switch from unbridled consumerism to a framework of productive investment capable of generating a successful and sustainable manufacturing and industrial base that can securely underpin UK living standards….

…Under the current system, around just 80 board members across the largest five banks make decisions that shape the entire UK economy, even though these individuals have no obligation or mandate to consider the needs of society or the economy as a whole, and are not accountable in any way to the public: it is for the maximisation of their own interests, not the national interest. Under sovereign money, the money creation committee would be highly transparent—we have discussed this already—and accountable to Parliament.

Mr MacNeil: I hear what the right hon. Gentleman says about money going into building, housing and mortgages, but is that not because the holders of money reckon that they can get a decent return from that sector? They would invest elsewhere if they thought that they could get a better return. One reason why the UK gets a better return from that area than, say, Germany is that we have no rent controls. As a result, money is more likely to go into property than into developing industry, which is more likely to happen in Germany.

Mr Meacher:

…………………..The question at the heart of the debate is who should create the money? Would Parliament ever have voted to delegate power to create money to those same banks that caused the horrendous financial crisis that the world is still suffering? I think the answer is unambiguously no.

For all those reasons, the examination of the merits of a sovereign monetary system is now urgently needed, and I call on the Government to set up a commission on money and credit, with particular reference to the potential benefits of sovereign money, which offers a way out of

20 Nov 2014 : Column 449

the continuing and worsening financial crises that have blighted this country and the whole international economy for decades……..

12.13 pm

Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con):

…………A lot has been made of the ignorance of Members of Parliament of how money is created. I suspect that that ignorance, not just in Members of Parliament but in the intellectual elite in this country, explains many things, not least why we entered the financial crisis with a regulatory system that was so unprepared for a banking crisis……….

First, all bankers—not just rogue bankers but even the best, the most honourable and the most honest—do things that would land the rest of us in jail. Near my house in France is a large grain silo. After the harvest, farmers deposit grain in it. The silo gives them a certificate for every tonne of grain that they deposit. They can withdraw that amount of grain whenever they want by presenting that certificate. If the silo owner issued more certificates than there was grain kept in his silo, he would go to jail, but that is effectively what bankers do. They keep as reserves only a fraction of the money deposited with them, which is why we call the system the fractional reserve banking system. Murray Rothbard, a much neglected Austrian economist in this country, said very flatly that banking is therefore fraud: fractional reserve banking is fraud; it should be outlawed; banks should be required to keep 100% reserves against the money they lend out. ……….

If a bank lends a company £10 million, it does not need to go and borrow that money from a saver; it simply creates an extra £10 million by electronically crediting the company’s bank account with that sum. It creates £10 million out of thin air. By contrast, when a bank loan is repaid, that extinguishes money; it disappears into thin air. The total money supply increases when banks create new loans faster than old loans are repaid…….

spivs and crooks have a field day.”—[Official Report, 11 November 1997; Vol. 300, c. 731-32.]

Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con): I am listening carefully to my right hon. Friend. Does that mean that the banks are uncontrollable, as things stand?

Anyone interested in setting up a housing co-operative to buy housing to then rent to our members along the lines of the idea below ?

My idea is to simply set up an organisation which would continuously seek crowdfunding for redeemable shares offering (at present) about 3-4% which would be used to purchase rentable homes. The redeemable shares would enable savers currently offered laughable savings rates by the banks to be able to use this as a safe and reliable method of savings offering much better returns than banks.

The tenants to which these homes would be rented would also share in the profit their rent ultimately generates as it pays off the purchase cost. The whole idea is to enable the tenants to build up a sum of money from the profits of the organisation for them to use as a deposit to buy their own home.

If the funds borrowed to 100% fund the purchase are fully repaid by means of charging rent, at the end of a term similar to an average type of mortgage of, say 25 years, then at that point the organisation would own the asset outright. It would obviously then be able to offer a portion of the value of that asset to the tenant.

This portion would accrue from the moment the tenant commences paying rent and would be available to the tenant whenever he leaves which could be at any time. He does not have to remain any longer than any initial short tenancy.

The tenant would always be paying a ‘market’ rent the same as any other tenant. But he would be getting something back that no other tenant ever does. He will be getting back a portion of the rent he has paid which he can then use as his deposit to go and buy his own home with an ordinary mortgage if he so wishes.

Instead of just paying rent to line a landlord’s pocket, tenants would get something back so their rent would be not completely wasted money dow the drain as it normally is for all tenants.

This model would thus enable a person with no capital whatever to accrue a deposit for their own home purchase, or even use this organisation to end up either a long leaseholder on low rent if he wished to remain in the property. It could almost be viewed as a means of just turning an ordinary rental into a (different) type of mortgage for the ultimate purchase of a home. A mortgage where no deposit is needed at all. It’s just a rental that eventually just turns into actual home ownership.

It offers a means of home ownership which dis-enfranchises no-one and whereby any tenant turns progressively into an owner.

If set up as the legal concept of a Co-op, it is legally allowed to ask the public to invest in redeemable shares which would pay an interest rate which might currently be 3-4%.

This is just a brief description of the idea, obviously there is a lot of detail to ramble on about, but I’ll leave that for the moment as it isn’t needed until people want to know more and join.

Oh, by the way. I have spent a lot of time doing all the maths and the idea does work. You can have a look for yourself if you are interested & contact me.

With the help of the crowdfunding crowd, we can cut the legs of those greedy bankers and eventually take all their mortgage business away from them so that every penny people pay to live in a home goes directly towards actually paying for that home and not the huge profits for greedy bankers.

I can top the story ‘Council Snoopers Check if Elderly Transfer Homes to Avoid Care fees’ (Daily Telegraph October 19 2013) with what is probably a nastier abuse of public office by councils I have experienced.

I became a single parent, entirely reliant on the benefit system because the mother of my baby son became acutely mentally ill with schizophrenia on his birth, causing maximum disruption to our lives.

Instead of the benefits system providing a ‘safety net’ enabling families to survive difficult circumstances, the maladministration of it systematically destroyed our lives a little bit more every year, causing me to lose my house when it should never have been lost, for instance.

Finally becoming homeless in 2011 and evicted at only 24 hours notice by the fraudulent, dishonest Lehmans Bank’s equally fraudulent subsidiary mortgage lender SPML, the local council said it was not obliged to fulfill it’s statutory legal obligation of housing my son and me on the grounds that I was ‘Intentionally homeless’ because, in their view, I ‘should never have bought my house nine years previously because’, the council housing official said, ‘I’m gobsmacked you bought a house. As a single parent of your age, you should have realised you would never be able to work again’. This is a direct quote.

The poisonous council housing official said that it was her opinion that what I should have done was, instead of spending the £80 000 cash I had left from the forced sale of a previous, larger house (sold to avoid re-possession) to buy another one, I should have spent the £80k on renting a property. Then, when all that money ran out, I would have been able to claim the housing benefit allowance to pay the rent and therefore I would not have become homeless.

I was supposed by this screamingly stupid person to have this gift of clairvoyance which if applied to everyone would require that no person should ever ‘take the risk’ of buying a house in case some time in the future unforeseen circumstances prevent them from earning an income and they cannot pay their mortgage which will inevitably lead to eviction – and it’s all their own fault for not being able to see into the future.

I was specifically told that I should have known that is what I should have done, rather than buy my own house ! It was made clear to me that the council official thought I had done something ‘wrong’ buying a house and she personally disapproved of me buying a house and she had the opinion I should have rented accommodation and that is what she would have done, she said.

Therefore, this idiot continued, when I bought my house I would have known that because I would never work again I could not pay my mortgage and that would eventually cause me to be evicted (nine years later) & therefore I had willfully and deliberately caused my own eviction thereby fulfilling the legal definition of being ‘Intentionally homeless’ by deliberately doing, or failing to do something that ultimately caused my homelessness.

This is a legal construct which allows councils to label a homeless person a ‘willful wrongdoer’ who because they made themselves deliberately homeless, does not deserve the support of the housing & benefits legislation designed to support people in statutory need.

While it may be reasonable to have the concept of being ‘deliberately homeless’ available so that it may be properly used to prevent obvious abuses of the social housing system, the sort of circumstances described above are a clear and quite ludicrous abuse of law. It seems impossible to imagine any court could allow this obvious abuse.

This is also not a unique case. I have come across many other examples of this legal point being mis-used and abused on a regular basis by many local councils up and down the country to enable them to avoid housing people they are legally obliged to house under Parliamentary legislation.

The completely sick joke about it all is that all of this is driven by the simple lack of having sufficient money in relevant housing budgets to properly deal with whatever housing issues need dealing with according to the law as it stands. But Government expenditure actually rises exponentially as a direct result of maladministration like this.

By mis-using and abusing law to weasel out of housing people in need just to apparently to save money, it actually ends up costing a vast amount more money because the State simply ends up spending much, much more money dealing with the various consequences resulting from people being made entirely homeless by a vindictive, deceitful & downright wicked State. This is demonstrated again and again by the disgusting behaviour of dim and small minded Government officials in both Central Government and in particular Local Councils who just make up the rules as they go along to suit their own warped minds.

So, in my particular case, no money whatever was actually saved by failing to obey the law which said the local council had a legal obligation to house a child & parent made street homeless overnight by a rapacious and dishonest and fraudulent mortgage lender.

My son and I spent over seven months in slum-like bed & breakfast accommodation in a cosy arrangement with Pakistani owners and the council which paid them about £1500 a month. I was told by one of these Pakistani’s colleagues how he also had a lucrative sideline in various criminal activities, including the criminal importing & exporting of empty container loads of wine to falsely evade & reclaim VAT and other customs duties.

Then there were other, huge, but not easily identified expenditures as a vast job creation scheme swung into action to gobble up thousands of hours of social services and council employees time dealing with all the ‘meetings’ ‘reports’ writing and box ticking that went on to deal with this ‘case’ which still rumbles on and looks set to continue rumbling on to infinity.

Finally, Government money is now being spent on paying an extortionate, unnaturally inflated rent to my private landlord who happens to be a banker, to pay his mortgage on the house I now live in, so he may become even richer by having the State buy him a house to rent out.

This house could, instead, be owned by the State, rather than a private banker landlord on the make and would then result in a mere fraction of the money that is being spent by this incompetent State maladministration being needed.

This particular maladministration of a housing issue I have personally experienced & described above comes at the end of a long catalogue of other abuses from my local council which include the ‘snooping’ whereby they discovered I was a company director by virtue of me having spent £20 on the paperwork of setting up a Ltd company with a view to becoming self employed in the future.

The council used this information (gained only by a ‘snooping’ process) to confabulate it into the idea of me earning money so justifying them to withhold council tax benefits and never repay what they wrongly/illegally withheld, thereby successfully milking me of some thousands of pounds from my sole income of single parent benefits.

THE SIMPLE EXPLANATION OF HOW THE WORLD WIDE CREDIT CRISIS EXISTS AND WHAT CAUSED IT

Understanding the reasons for the Worldwide economic meltdown are not easy. This is only because the banking world wrap even the simplest of ideas in gobbledegook language no one else outside the financial industry usually understands.

That is because they don’t want anyone else to understand it, otherwise finance would lose it’s mystique and bankers would lose their sinister hold over everyone else. So, all we have to do is unwrap all this gobbledegook and use plain language instead.

let’s get straight to the point. Amongst all that pompous financial verbiage wittered by all those self important bankers is this simple truth.

If nobody had ever borrowed a penny from anyone else, and everyone had always paid for everything they had purchased only with money already in their possession, nobody anywhere would owe any money to anyone else at all.

If that was the case, and it is only an imaginary idea just to illustrate exactly where this awful financial armageddon came from which is destroying the World economy right now, then there would be absolutely no credit crisis and no financial meltdown. It would simply be impossible ! Everybody would be in complete control of their finances !

There would be no loss of jobs and no increase in poverty and no meaningful inflation either. No governments would be going bust or falling apart at the seams in their desperate attempts to be able to pay all their debts.

Everyone – governments, businesses and individuals would be in complete control of their financial lives because they would have no debts to pay. Therefore no one else would have any control over anyone else and be able to interfere in their lives and even destroy them because they owed money to the interferer.

Debt makes the person borrowing the money beholden to the lender. The borrower immediately loses control of their own lives when they borrow money.

A government, individual, business or bank which depends for survival by always being able to borrow money from someone else is not only permanently in the control of whoever lends them money, but is always a hairsbreadth away from complete annihilation if nobody is willing to lend them money anymore.

And that is exactly what has happened. The banks have gradually engineered a vice like grip over every financial transaction. They have also successfully brainwashed most of humanity into believing that borrowing nearly all the money needed for trading with each other is the proper way to conduct financial affairs whether you are a business, government or individual.

Of course it is the banks that lend the money, which is why they want everyone to believe that borrowing money for everything is the right way to do things. It is also a curious fact that people lending others money think they have a right to tell the borrower what to do and what not to do, generally boss them about and tell them how to conduct their lives – particularly when it comes to how to organise the money borrowed.

The present financial crisis arose quite simply because with everyone borrowing more and more money as the banks wished and duly persuaded them, more and more control of everyday life went from businesses, individuals and governments into the hands of the banks. And the only thing the banks knew or cared about was making more and more money for themselves.

Then the same problem of loss of control hit the banks too. This first of all happened to Lehmann’s bank in 2008 when it suddenly discovered that it could no longer borrow money from other banks to pay for what Lehmanns owed to others.

Other banks didn’t want to lend to Lehmanns because they had observed Lehmanns becoming more and more greedy, dishonest and devious with increasing suspicions of fraud as well. Lehmanns were at the forefront of driving the concept of borrowing into an arcane stratosphere of unreality where they contrived to lend the same bit of money again, and again and again – all at the same time; Lehmanns conjured up an idea where the same money could be lent almost an unlimited amount of times all at once.

When Lehmanns discovered no one else wanted to lend them any more money, that in turn meant Lehmanns couldn’t pay money it owed to other banks. Those other banks then found they, in turn, hadn’t got enough money to pay their creditors either. And so the whole sorry merry-go-round of financial industry fictional fantasy money created out of thin air collapsed. All because everyone owed everyone else ever increasing amounts of money and no longer had any control over their own financial lives.

This whole rotten edifice has been crumbling ever since Lehmanns went bust and everyone found out mendacity, fraud and corruption were rampant in the financial industry, nowhere more so than in the banks.

Banks have effectively destroyed money by completely debasing it; turning it on it’s head and making it into debt instead of money. This has resulted in the banks controlling every aspect of all of our financial lives, taking away our own ability to manage our affairs efficiently.

This is why there is a Wordwide economic meltdown of nightmarish proportions.

Quite simply, banks have succeeded in destroying the money we all need to conduct any form of trading because they turned it all into debt instead of real money. and now everyone is finding it increasingly impossible to pay it all back as the debt just gets uncontrolably bigger and bigger.

Aggressive mortgage lending to high-risk borrowers by a British subsidiary of defunct US investment bank Lehman Brothers at the height of the property boom has been fully revealed for the first time in files obtained by Financial Mail.

These relate to almost 10,000 mortgages advanced in 2006 by Southern Pacific Mortgage Loans. The loans were quickly sold to investors.

This process, on a global scale, triggered Lehman’s collapse in September 2008 and was central to the banking crisis.

Investors were persuaded to buy mortgages because they would, supposedly, earn a regular income from the interest paid by borrowers, as well as have security over the property.

Even before the crisis, SPML raised eyebrows for its lax lending. But the scale of recklessness is made public here for the first time.

Our analysis of SPML’s 2006 lending has found that three out of five mortgages were ‘liar loans’ – offered on a ‘self-certified’ basis where borrowers were not required to prove their income. A third of the mortgages were interest-only, where capital does not have to be repaid until the end of the mortgage term.

One in five borrowers had court judgments against them for uncleared debt elsewhere, averaging £4,400, at the time the mortgages were lent. Mainstream lenders will not advance mortgages to someone with a court judgment who has not paid off the debt.

Two in five of the loans were for 80% of the property’s value or more, with some mortgages equating to as much as 95%. Compare this, for example, with a conservative lender such as Nationwide Building Society, whose average outstanding loan is for less than half the value of the property it is secured against.

The data also gives a shocking, if unsurprising, picture of how quickly SPML’s borrowers fell into difficulty.

By March 2009, of SPML’s mortgages originally lent in 2006 and still in force, 40% were three months or more in arrears. Almost 10% were over 12 months in arrears.

￼

Silent: Acenden’s Amany Attia

Scores of mortgages had been in arrears for more than 24 months, indicating that some borrowers fell behind as soon as the money was lent. Citizens Advice describes this lending as ‘set up to fail’ – with lenders cynically advancing money in the knowledge that borrowers couldn’t afford the repayments.

Interest rates on remaining SPML mortgages dating from 2006 now average 7.09%, but some unlucky borrowers are paying more than 16%. Two in five borrowers pay 10% or higher.

The files also reveal how relentlessly SPML borrowers have been pursued through the courts, frequently losing their homes. Of borrowers-whose 2006 mortgages remain in force, almost 40% have had some form of litigation brought against them by the business that administers SPML’s remaining loans.

This business is called Acenden, but is better known – and reviled by borrowers – as Capstone, a name it ditched last year in a bid to reinvent itself. Capstone was owned by Lehman until the bank’s collapse.

Today, Acenden is profitable and managed, and part-owned, by former Lehman bankers who spearheaded the original lending. This includes Acenden chief executive Amany Attia, who came to Britain in 2001 to introduce Lehman’s discredited US mortgage lending processes in this country. She declined to comment.

The data that Financial Mail has analysed relates to just one tranche of SPML’s lending, but is representative of the billions of pounds lent by SPML and equivalent businesses. Acenden refuses to publish the numbers of repossessions it has secured relating to the mortgages it administers.

However, it is estimated by Citizens Advice, for instance, that such lenders seek ten times the number of repossessions sought by mainstream lenders, even though their share of the total mortgage market is about one twentieth.